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THE GOTHS IN NEW-ENGL VND. 



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DISCOURSE 

DELIVERED AT THE A>NIVERSARY OF THE 

PHILOMATHESIAN SOCIETY 

OF MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE. 

AUGUST 15, 1843. 

BY GEORGE P. MARSH 

antiquam exquirite matrem. 

PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE SOCIETY. 



MIDDLEBURY; 

PRINTED BY J. COBB JR 
1843, 



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M3(s> 



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DISCOURSE, 



To a serious and thoughtful scholar, it is an enviable and re- 
sponsible privilege to be permitted to discuss, on an occasion like 
the present, a theme of his own selection. For, were a speaker, 
who aims at the presentation of facts, and the development of prin- 
ciples, with reference to the practical duties that flow from them, 
allowed to select for himself his own ' fit audience,' he could 
scarcely hope to find a more appropriate circle of listeners, than 
that which the annual festival of a higher literary institution as- 
sembles. On the one hand are those, who are devoted to the 
acquisition and diffusion, or the practical application, of recondite 
knowledge, either learning simply that they may teach, or accumu- 
lating stores of facts and principles, to serve for argument, illus- 
tration, and guidance in the more elevated walks of public and 
professional life. These, accustomed to trace effects through 
their proximate to their ultimate causes, and habitually looking 
back from conclusion to premiss, may be supposed best able to 
apprehend and appreciate principles and their relations ; and these, 
however unseen their influence, and however devious and obscure 
the channel through which it acts on the public mind, are the 
teachers, and by consequence the real rulers, of the nation. On 
the other hand are men, for the most part thinking and intelligent, 
but not highly educated, who have emerged from speculation into 
action, and whose participation in the hurrying and engrossing 
cares and burdens of social and material life has not onlveman- 



cipated them from the shackles of scholastic prejudice, but ha- 
bituated them to a promptness of action, Avhich in some degree 
excludes reflection, and dispones them rather to look forward from 
the existing cause to the future effect, and to judge from the ap- 
parent analogies of their personal experience, than to busy them- 
selves in inquiring whether the more general laws, which have 
governed the past, have not yet sufiicient vitality to control the 
future. 

But speculative inquiry into the laws of matter or of mind, with- 
out reference to their connection with the duties of the present, 
and their influence on the fortunes of the future, is but an idle 
dilettantism: and calculation on the future, without recourse to 
(he principles which observation of the past educes, is little bet- 

r than a groping and conjectural empiricism. The man of 
action therefore ought to be brought to s€ek the sometimes dim, 
but always steady, light of principle; and the man of speculation 
to remember that the effects, which he has traced to their source, 
have now, in their turn, become efficient causes, and that the 
laws, which he has investigated, are more important in their re- 
lations to the boundless future, than to the narrow present or 
'imited past. 

To one actuated by the views which I have supposed, it is spe- 
cially desirable to speak to his audience, rather than to address 
them through the medium of the press. For here, that of the 
poet. 

What we hear 
With weaker passion will affect the heart, 
Than when the faithtnl e.yc beholds the part> 

IS reversed. The tongue and the ear are the appropriate active 
and passive organs of the spoken word, which is the only true 
living medium of communication between man and his fellow, as 
is the spiritual word betv/een man and his Maker. Human lan- 
guage is composed of significant sounds, while visible characters 
and their combinations in written syllables and words are not 
' i^iguage, but arbitrary and conventional symbols, by which lan- 
lage is recalled. Articulate sounds are immediately and directly 



expressive and intelligible, but tlicir conventional representatives 
require the intervention of a foreign interpreter, the eye, an or- 
gan properly conversant only with certain sensible qualities of 
material things ; and therefore it is that men often listen with 
attehlive interest to that v/hich, if written only, would never boast 
a reader. 

I think myself happy therefore in being invited to address an 
intelligent audience, on topics of philosophical interest and prac- 
tical importance, by the fittest mode of communication, though 
abundantly conscious, that what I shall offer will fall far short 
both of the advantages of the occasion, and the magnitude and 
interest of the subject. 

From one who speaks wiierc there is none to reply, and who 
.ims rather to provoke discussion, and to excite reflection, than 
to demonstrate absolute truth, or to rouse to immediate action, 
neither logical method nor impassioned eloquence is to be expec- 
ted, and the speaker will be rather discursive, than argumentative 
or persuasive. But though the form of his discourse is not that 
best suited to the establishment of principles, it is well calculated 
to elicit them ; and though he is not confined to rigorous argu- 
ment, he is more likely to arrive at safe results than the disputant, 
who, from the nature of his jwsitron, is rather a defender of his 
thesis til an a seeker after truth. 

The most favourite theme of public discussion for the last four- 
score years, bodi in this country and in Europe, has been the 
absolute rights of man, and in these discussions, by the common 
mistake of confounding the means and the end, his relative rights 
and correlative duties have been unfortunately too generally over- 
looked. For rights are truly valuable only because the enjoy- 
ment of them is indispensable to the performance of the duties, 
which our relations to God and to man impose upon us. Nor 
does the establishment of the absolute rights of man upon their 
true basis require much discussion. For a perception of these 
rights is intuitive, or perhaps I should say rather, instinctive, 
because it is, even unconsciously, an universal ground and prin- 
ciple of human action. But, as instincts may be suppressed, or 



even implanted, by external restraints or stimuli,* so man's in- 
tuitive perception of his natural rights may be checked in its 
development, and prevented from ever arriving at distinct con- 
sciousness. Yet, though suppressed in the individual, it cannot 
be extirpated from the race, and though destructible in men, it is 
as immortal in man, as the selfish principle, with which it is in- 
separably connected. But our relative rights, or conversely our 
duties, are not too plain to require discussion, nor, apparently 
conflicting, as they often are, with the selfish principle, and flow- 
ing from obscure relations, can they be too frequently inculcated 
or too earnestly enforced. 

Man's duties are first religious, including those to self, then 
domestic, then patriotic, then philanthropic. But when I say, 
that the duties of religion include those referring to self, I do by 
no means assent to that characteristic doctrine of the English 
religious philosophy of the eighteenth century, so fatal in religion, 
and so degrading and demoralizing in ethics, which solves all 
questions of duty by a calculation of the balance of profit and loss ; 
nor do I recognise the self seeking principle as a ground or 
foundation of moral obligation at all. Nor by distinguishing du- 
ties into classes, do I mean to subordinate the one to the other, 
as inferior in point of oWigation, — for I hold that under the 
harmonious scheme of christian morality, all conflict of duty is 
but apparent, — but I divide them upon grounds of convenience, 
because they are most appropriately considered in connection 
with the different relations from which they flow. 

So far then as any human obligations are separable from our 
general duties to our Maker, the observations which I shall offer 
will bear upon our patriotic duties as American citizens, or in 
other words, my country is my subject, and especially that por- 
tion of it, whose sons are most honourably distinguished by true 
nobility of origin, uniformity and harmony of character, and in- 
dependence of extraneous influence ; and it is with reference to 
the danger of contamination from foreign contagion, that I shall 
aim to give my remarks a practical character. 

*Lyeird Principles of Geology, Book III, cliap. 3. 



Although the people of New England are not deficient ui the 
just and honourable pride of descent from an eminently wise and 
virtuous ancestry, yet in the excitement of our rapid growth, pro- 
gress, and development, there is danger, that we shall be too 
thoughtless of the past, to exercise an intelligent foresight in re- 
gard to the future. For it belongs to the character of youthful 
and vigorous nations, to concern themselves with the present and 
the future rather than with the past, and it is not until the sun 
of their greatness has passed its culminating point, and is begin- 
ning to decline in the west, that a spirit of antiquarian research 
is excited, or that they seriously occupy themselves in philosoph- 
ical investigations concerning the causes and means of their ele- 
vation. It is chiefly for this reason, that the early history of 
governments, even of recent origin and modern organization, is 
often involved in hopeless obscurity, and the preservation of the 
records, the memorials, or even the traditional memory of im- 
portant events, does not become an object of solicitude until time 
has forever obliterated them. 

Our onward spirit of advancement is, I fear, accompanied with 
too much thoughtless indifference, in relation to the events of our 
national infancy. We are too apt to consider our national his- 
tory as commencing with that Revolution, which did but legally 
separate countries already both disjoined and alienated, to con- 
found individuality with independence, and to forget that we 
were a nation a century before we became an empire. In the 
well merited tribute of our admiration to those patriot warriors 
and statesmen, by whose genius and whose labours in the field 
and the cabinet, the energies of our fathers were guided to the 
achievement of acknowledged independence, we overlook the 
higher reverence we owe to that earlier generation of pion- 
eers in the forest, and wise and pious doctors in the church, who 
planted and watered the germ of our free institutions, and laid 
broad and deep the foundations of that superstructure, which 
with sometimes incongruous architecture, we are now erecting. 
The frame of our government was the work of the Revolution; 
its principles the results of the teachings of a preceding ago. 



But we must remember, that vvliat oui:^' forefatiiers did for us we 
are doing for our children, and th^ the charatter of their in- 
•titutions will depejid much on_cl^ sliape -ijito which we shall 
:nould our own. It is an ancieiit maxirij^hat iridividual power 
■ :■, to be maintained by the same means by which it was origin- 
ally acquired. " The same doctrine is no doubt in general true, 
when applied to national greatness ; and if therefore we would 
transmit unimpaired to those who are to come after us the inher- 
itance which we have received from those who are gone before, 
we must watch over and protect the integrity of our national in- 
stitutions, in the same spirit which actuated their original fra- 
iners. 

But national in-stitutions, where not forcibly imposed by usur- 
pation or conquest^ or dictated by foreign influence, are the growth 
and product of national character, and the vigilant and sedulous 
cultivation of the moral features, and the observance of the prin- 
ciples, which constitute the primitive Novanglian type, are there- 
fore the indispensable means of preserving those institutions, 
which have been more successful in accomplishing the true .ends 
of society and of human goverumeut, in the formation of a wise, 
virtuous, and prosperous people, than any other system of socigi 
order, which has been hitherto devised. In that type will be 
found all the elements involved iu the ideal of the perfect citizen, 
and the law of a state, of a political society containing within 
itself a priiiciple of progressive development, and avis medicatrix, 
dimly anticipated by t^e haif-.christiau Plato, and impliedly re- 
vealed by chi'istianity, was first and most perfectly realized by the 
communities of New England. 

Let me here be allowed to note, by way of digression, two 
singular facts, which the diligent student of our history will dis- 
cover, and which do not appear to haye attracted so much aiQtice 
as their importance deserves. The first is, that the spirit of aii- 
tagoifiism to English principles in law, government and religion, 
wag more strongly pronounced, while we were in a state of coloni- 
al subjection, than it has been since the Revolution emancipated 
ub from the British yoke. Th« other is, that in the fluctuations 



of public opinion in this country and in Europe upon the great 
principles of political and religious liberty, the contemporaneous 
currents hav.e often run counter, on the opposite sides of the At- 
lantic, and we have thus been preserved from those entangling 
alliances, in which a too close communion wdth the political sys- 
tems of the old world would have involved us. Those periods, 
in which we have most strongly tended to consolidation and des- 
potism, have been precisely the eras of republican and democratic 
tendencies in Europe, and, when we have verged to the contrary 
extreme, public opinion on the continent and in England has 
been favourable to less popular forms of government. The for- 
mer of these apparent anomalies is to be referred to the hostility 
of feeling generated by the oppressive treatment of the colonies 
by the mother country ; and though the influence of England in 
politics, literature, philosophy and religion, has exercised and 
still exercises a most baneful sway over the American mind, it is 
still an honour to have yielded to conviction what we refused to 
arbitrary power. The other fact adverted to I ascribe to the in- 
fluence reciprocally exerted by Europe and America upon each 
other. The impulse given upon one side of the ocean is felt up- 
on the other ; but time is required for the production of this effect, 
and the force is usually exhausted in its source, before it arrives 
at its acme at the opposite pole of its influence, and the action of 
the two continents upon each other may be illustrated by that of 
a lever, whose ends are moved in contrary directions by one 
force. 

To those who have studied the early history of New England 
in its sources, in that spirit of charitable and intelligent sympa- 
thy, which is a necessary condition for the profitable study of all 
history — for we can understand nothing human in which we 
do not sympathize, — my estimate of the moral and intellectual 
character of her people will not seem extravagant ; but I do not 
expect the assent of those who look for instruction to strangers 
in blood and in religion, or who, too indolent to seek truth at the 
fountain, are deceived by that shallow querulousness, into which 
our native historical writers sometimes fall, either because whole- 
2 



10 

sale blame is cheaper than discriminating praise, or because, hav- 
ing themselves relapsed into the superstitions, which their wiser 
ancestors had shaken off, they seek to apologize for their own 
apostasy, by decrying the character, and exaggerating the errors, 
of their fathers. 

The intellectual character of our Puritan forefathers is that 
derived by inheritance from our remote Gothic ancestry, restored 
by its own inherent elasticity to its primitive proportions, upon 
the removal of the shackles and burdens, which the spiritual and 
intellectual tyranny of Rome had for centuries imposed upon it ; 
but its moral traits are a superinduction of the temper and spir- 
ituality of Christianity upon the soul of the Goth, under condi- 
tions best suited to purify the heart, and steel to the utmost the 
energies of the spirit. 

The emigration of the first settlers of New England, contem- 
plated in its causes, its circumstances, and its results, is the 
noblest and most touching incident in all history. Antiquity fur- 
nished neither motive nor occasion for such a display of the most 
generous and heroic qualities of humanity; and it was reserved 
for Christianity to suggest the motive, and for the atrocious tyran- 
ny of the bigoted Stuarts to supply the occasion, for that rare 
union of Christian endurance, self sacrificing devotion, and chiv- 
alrous energy, which will embalm the memory of the Pilgrims 
while men shall venerate the constancy of the martyr, and admire 
the courage of the hero. 

The character of the Pilgrims, though the appropriate heritage 
of those in whose veins their blood continues to flow, is the com- 
mon property, and in the eyes of all truthful and generous spirits 
of whatever nation or creed, the common glory of the race from 
which they sprang ; and while we contemn the malice, which 
would destroy our reverence for the memory of our fathers, in 
order the more easily to seduce us into apostasy from their prin- 
ciples, we cannot but pity that narrowness of sectarian bigotry, 
or national prejudice, which, for the sake of palliating the crimes 
of those who drove them into exile, or of inflicting a wound upon 
xhose who have inherited their principles and their faith, would, 



11 

ill tarnishing the fiiir fame of the Pilgrims, deprive humanity of 
its liighest honours. 

Tliat the mind of New England is plainly distinguishable from 
that of the mother country, is due partly to the circumstances 
under which the colonies were planted, and the subsequent polit- 
ical disturbances in England, which both promoted the emigra- 
tion of new colonists of like spirit with their predecessors, and 
protected the infant community from the interference of the 
Stuarts ; but chiefly to the fact, that our forefathers belonged to 
that grand era in British history, when the English mind, under 
the impulse of the Reformation, was striving to recover its Gothic 
tendencies, by the elimination of the Roman element, and giving 
a new proof of that consanguinity with Greece, which the demon- 
strable affinity of the ancient English tongue with the lanffuao-e 
of the Greeks so clearly indicates.* 

The period to which I refer embraces the century extending 
from the accession of Elizabeth to the restoration of despotism, 
and the overthrow of British freedom, under the reign of Charles 
II ; and is distinguished by the pregnant fiict, that to it belong 
not only the greatest names in the list of England's worthies, but 
almost every name, which sustains her claim to intellectual su- 
premacy, and still more conspicuously, by the discussion of the 
principles of civil and religious liberty, which resulted in their 
temporary establishment by the sword of Cromwell, and their 
defence and illustration by the pen of Freedom's mightiest apostle, 
John Milton. 

In this age flourished Bacon, Raleigh, the two Sidneys, Spen- 
cer, Shakspeare, Ben Johnson, Coke, Hampden, Hooker, Leigh- 
ton, Howe, Baxter, Cudworth, Vane, Milton, Cromwell, Dryden, 
Newton and Hale, the loftiest geniuses in literature, the profound- 
est speculators in philosophy, the most pious, learned and eloquent 
divines, the most devoted patriots, the wisest statesmen, and the 
greatest sages in the law, to whom the soil of England has given 
birth. 

*See tlie argument of Rask, in his Undersogelse om det gamle Nordiske Sprogs 
Opiindelge, which ig, in the main, equally applicable to the Anglo-Saxon. 



12 

In this age Cromwell, uniting in himself man's two highest vo- 
cations, as the dispenser ofGod's mercies, and the minister of his 
judgments, exhibited to Europe the proudest spectacle which the 
world had witnessed — a tyrant at the bar of an offended people, 
— and by a series of measures stamped by the profoundest wis- 
dom and the most prophetic foresight, raised England from the 
rank of a secondary power to a level with the proudest, and 
laid the foundations of that maritime and commercial greatness, 
which has enabled her to encircle the globe with an almost un- 
broken chain of conquests.* 

In this age, the true principles of the freedom of the citizen, 
the liberty of conscience, and the liberty of the press were pro- 
claimed with more than Demosthenian eloquence, by the im- 
mortal Milton, in a series of treatises, which constitute the crown- 
ing triumph of his exalted genius, and exhibit far more of the 
unrivalled splendor of his intellect than even his divine epic. And 
I trust I shall be pardoned, if I here pause to pay my homage to 
the lofty spirit displayed in that marvellous preface to the second 
book of his Treatise on Church Government, where, in such 
burning words as were never else vouchsafed to mortal pen, in- 
spiring the deepest awe in all who reverence the divinity in his 
image, he gives utterance to the very voice of conscience, as it 
spake to his inner man, overawing his will, and irresistibly im- 
pelling him, for the sake of proclaiming to his countrymen and 
to Europe the truth of God,*to forsake for a time those flowery 
paths in which he most delighted to rove, and to forego those 
studies, in which he shames not, with a noble self-confidence, to 
declare that he felt himself able to achieve immortality, or in his 
own words, " by labour and intense study joined with the strong 
*' propensity of nature, to leave something so written to after- 
" times, as they should not willmgly let it die." 

*It lias been determined, as we learn by recent arrivals, that Cromwell shall 
occupy no place among the effigies of the British sovereigns, by which the new 
Parliament-House is to be decorated; and Romanizing England, may now share 
with Romanized Bavaria the.infamy ofthe two meanest acts since the imprisonment 
of Napoleon, the exclusion namely of the bust of Luther from the VValhalla, and of 
that of Cromwell from the British capitol. 



13 

To this age, in fine, as if to exemplify tlie tendency of extremes 
to meet, belongs the greater part of that series of acts of legisla- 
tive intolerance, which are now generally designated, after the 
title of one ofthe most obnoxious of them pa?sed under the reign of 
Charles II, the Acts of Uniformity. For atrocity, these acts stand 
unparalleled in the history of legislation in representative gov- 
ernments, and are indeed a fit pendant to that system of criminal 
law, v»hich visited with the punishment of death the theft of a 
shilling, or the defacing ofthe image and superscription of ma- 
jesty on a penny, but imposed, and to this hour imposes, no pen- 
alty on the violation ofthe most sacred of domestic rights. 

But by the interposition of that Providence, which knows how to 
bring good out of evil, the persecutions authorized by these acts 
were made instrumental in winnowing the wheat from the chaff, 
and in laying the foundation of a new republic, destined, we trust, 
long to remain as a model of a system of human government ba- 
sed on those doctrines of civil and religious liberty, which, invol- 
ving the absolute separation and mutual independence of church 
and state, denying the sanction of law to ecclesiastical authority, 
and declaring that the people are the immediate source of polit- 
ical povv^er, are the only principles on which man can reconcile 
obedience to his ruler with duty to his God. 

The restoration of the Stuarts having accomplished the total 
overthrow of British liberty, the mind of England, exhausted by 
the struggle of a hundred years, slept ; and it is but now, that she 
is rousing from the slumber of two centuries, and preparing to 
renew the conflict, which will probably end only in securing to 
every citizen the enjoyment of equal legal rights, or in the com- 
plete establishment of religious intolerance, and spiritual and 
temporal despotism. The approaching contest, though different 
in aspect, is in substance the same conflict of principles, which 
rendered the civil dissensions of the seventeenth century so me- 
morable. In politics, it is a strife between the aristocracy and 
the people ; in spiritual and intellectual things, it is a struggle 
between the discordant elements ofthe English character. 

The miad of England, as I have already hinted, is, like her 



14 

lanffuao^e, composed of two hostile elements, the Gothic and the 
Roman, the former predominating in the foundation, the latter 
in the superstructure. 

I shall do my audience the justice to suppose, that they are too 
well instructed to be the slaves of that antiquated and vulgar prej- 
udice, which makes Gothicism and barbarism synonymous. The 
Goths, the common ancestors of the inhabitants of North Wes- 
tern Europe, are the noblest branch of the Caucasian race. We 
are their children. It was the spirit of the Goth, that guided the 
May-Flower across the trackless ocean; the blood of the Goth, 
that flowed at Bunker's Hill. 

Nor were the Goths the savage and destructive devastators, 
that popular error has made them. They indeed overthrew the 
dominion of Rome but they renovated her people ; they prostrated 
her corrupt government, but they respected her monuments ; and 
Theodoric the Goth not only spared but protected many a pre- 
cious memorial, which Italian rapacity and monkish superstition 
have since annihilated. The old lamentation. Quod non fecc- 
runt harhari^fecere JBarberini, contains a world of truth, and 
had not Rome's own sons been her spoilers, she might have shone 
xit this day in all the splendour of her Augustan age. 

England is Gothic by birth, Roman by adoption. Whatever 
she has of true moral grandeur, of higher intellectual power, she 
owes to the Gothic mother ; while her grasping ambition, her 
material energies, her spirit of exclusive selfishness, are due to 
the Roman nurse. 

The Goth is characterized by the reason, the Roman, by the 
understanding ; the one by imagination, the other by fancy ; the 
former aspires to the spiritual, the latter is prone to the sensu- 
ous. The Gothic spirit produced a Bacon, a Shakspeare, a Mil- 
ton ; the Roman, an Arkwright, a Brindley, and a Locke. It 
was a Roman, that gathered up the coals on which St. Lawrence 
had been broiled; a Goth, w^ho, when a fellow disciple of the 
great Swiss reformer had rescued his master's heart from the 
enemy, on the field where the martyr fell, snatched that heart 
from its preserver, and hurled it, yet almost palpitating with life, 
J 



15 

into the waters of a torrent, lest some new superstition should 
spring from the relics of Zwingli. 

Rome, it is said, thrice conquered the world ; by her arms, by 
her literature and art, by her religion. But Rome was essentially 
a nation of robbers. Her territory was acquired by unjust vio- 
lence. She plundered Greece of the choicest productions of the 
pencil and the chisel, and her own best literature and highest art 
are but imperfect copies of the master-pieces of the creative ge- 
nius of the Greek. She not only sacked the temples, but remo- 
ved to the imperial city the altars, and adopted the Gods, of the 
nations she conquered. Tiberius even prepared a niche for the 
Christian Saviour among the heathen idols in the Pantheon, and 
when Constantine made Christianity the religion of the state, he 
sanctioned the corruptions which Rome had engrafted upon it, and 
handed it down to his successors, contaminated with the accu- 
mulated superstitions of the whole heathen world. 

The Goth has thrice broken her sceptre. The Goth dispelled 
the charm that made her arms invincible. The Goth overthrew 
her idolatrous altar, and the Goth is now surpassing her proudest 
works in literature and in art. 

The cardinal distinction between these conflicting elements,, 
as exemplified in literature and art, government, and religion, may 
be thus stated. The Roman mistakes the means for the end^ 
and subordinates the principle to the form. The Goth, valuing 
the means only as they contribute to the advancement of the end, 
looks beneaththe form, and seeks the in-dwelling, life-giving prin- 
ciple, of which he holds the form to be but the outward expres- 
sion. With the Goth, the idea of life is involved in the conception 
of truth, and though he recognizes life as an immutable principle, 
yet he perceives that its forms of expression, of action, of suffer- 
ing, are infinitely diversified, agreeing however in this, that all 
its manifestations are characterized by development, motion, pro- 
gress. To him truth is symbolized by the phenomena of organic 
life. The living plant or animal, that has ceased to grow, has 
already begun to die. Living truth, therefore, though immuta- 
ble in essence, he regards as active, progressive in its manifes- 



16 

tations ; and he rejects truths, which have lost their vitality, form« 
divorced from their spirituality, symbols, which have ceased to 
be expressive. With the Goth, all truth is an ever-living princi- 
ple, whence should spring the outward expression, fluctuating, 
varying, according to the circumstances which call it forth ; with 
the Roman, its organic life is petrified, frozen into inflexible 
forms, inert. To the one it is a perennial fountain, a living stream, 
which murmurs, and flows, and winds * at its own sweet will,' 
refreshing all life within the sphere of its influence, and perpet- 
ually receiving new accessions from springs that are fed by the 
showers of heaven, as it hastens onward to that unfathomable 
ocean of divine knowledge, which is both its primeval source and 
its ultimate limit. To the other, it is a current congealed to ice 
by the rigour of winter, chilling alike the landscape and the spec- 
tator, or a pool, that stagnates, putrefies, and breeds its countless 
swarms of winged errors. 

In literature and art, the Goth pursues the development of a 
principle, the expression of a thought, the realization of an ideal ; 
the Roman seeks to fix the attention, and excite the admiration, 
of the critic or the spectator, by the material and sensuous beau- 
ties of his work. 

Thus in poetry, the Roman aims at smoothness of versification, 
harmonious selection and arrangement of words, and brilliancy 
of imagery ; the Goth strives to give utterance to * thoughts that 
breathe, in words that burn.' 

In plastic and pictorial art, the Roman attracts the spectator 
by the grace and voluptuous beauty of the external form, the har- 
mony of colouring, the fitness and proportion of the accessories, 
the excellence of keeping ; the Goth regards these but as auxilia- 
ries, and subordinates or even sacrifices them all to the expres- 
sion of the thought or passion, which dictates the action repre- 
sented. 

The Goth holds that government springs from the people, is 
instituted for their behoof, and is limited to the particular objects 
for which it was originally established ; that the legislature is but 
an organ for the solemn expression of the deliberate will of the 



17 

nation, tliat the coercive power of the executive extends only to 
the enforcement of that will, and that penal sanctions are incur- 
red only by resistance to it as expressed by the proper organ. The 
Roman views government as an institution imposed from with- 
out, and independent of the people, that it is its vocation not to 
express but to control the will ; and hence, by a ready corruption, 
government^comes to be considered as established for the private 
advantage of the ruler, who asserts not only a proprietary right 
to the emoluments of office, but an ultimate title to all the pos- 
sessions, both of the state and of the individual citizen. 

To the same source may be referred the poor fiction of di- 
vine indefeasible right, and that other degrading doctrine, which 
supposes all the power of government, legislative, judicial and 
executive, to have been originally lodged in the throne, allow- 
ing to the subject such political rights only, as have been conce- 
ded to him by the sovereign ; and hence too that falsest and 
most baneful of errors, the incubus of the British constitution, 
which consolidates or rather confounds church and state, conce- 
ding to the civil ruler supreme authority in spiritual matters, and 
ascribing temporal power to religious functionaries and ecclesi- 
astical jurisdictions. 

So in spiritual things we find a like antagonism. 

The Roman, holding the essence and efficacy of Christianity 
to consist in its ceremonies and its symbols, sinks the preacher in 
the priest, makes the minister a juggler, and conceives of Christ- 
ianity as a middle term, ^. punctum indi^crens between Judaism 
and idolatry, or a synthesis of the two, partaking equally of each ; 
the Goth feels it to be a living spiritual influence, involving the 
abnegation of both, and believes that all its outward rites are sym- 
bolical of that internal work, by which the intellect is elevated, 
and the heart purified. 

The one contemplates Christianity, not in its spirit and its in- 
fluences on individual or national character, but in its external 
form as a church, and loves it for its dead, though splendid and 
imposing rites; the other regards it as a living and life-giving 
3 



18 

spirit, a mode of iiiter-communioii between man and his maker, 
depending for its exercise neither upon ritual nor priest. 

The doctrines of the one are matters of opinion ; those of the 
other, of belief; the one assenting and conforming, because it 
is written; the other embracing, because the witness from 
within, coinciding with the evidence from without, assures him, 
with the certainty of demonstration, that God's word is very truth. 

The one, not perceiving that the catholicity of Christianity 
lies, not in its oneness of external form, but in its living organic 
power of adaptation, whereby Christian life, the highest expres- 
sion of individual character, and devotion, the external expression 
of religious feeling, must, like all manifestations of life, be diver- 
sified in form, would enforce all men to the observance of one 
prescribed ritual, and to obedience to one arbitrarily imposed 
form of ecclesiastical polity ; the other holds spiritual freedom to 
be of the essence of Christianity, and knowing, that wherever 
freedom exists, there will be discussion, diversity, division, he 
ventures not to brand difference in forms of worship, of church- 
government, or even of greeds, with the opprobrious name of 
schism. 

The traits, which I have attempted to describe, are found in 
different proportions, and more or less intim.ately combined, or 
modified by other ingredients, in the characters of all the nations 
of Southern and of Western Europe. In most countries, one of 
these conflicting elements decidedly preponderates, and stamps 
the national mind with its own characteristic peculiarities; and 
there are numerous instances, as in most of the German States, 
where the spirit and principles of the government are diametri- 
cally opposed to those of the people. In England, they subsist 
in alternate or divided preponderance, but never co-exist in har- 
monious combination. It is to the present general ascendency 
of the Roman element, that most of the defects of the English 
character of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are to be 
ascribed ; and the sensuous philosophy of Locke, and its wretched 
corollary, the selfish morality ofPaley, are rather the exponents, 
than the causes, of the leading tendencies of English mind. 



19 

The founders of the first New England colony, and their bretli- 
ren, who followed them to their new home in the course of the 
same century, belonged to the class most deeply tinctured with 
the moral and intellectual traits of their Northern ancestry. They 
emigrated at a period, when the Roman tendency was strongly 
developed in the ruling party in the mother country, fostered by 
the foolish James, who never heartily embraced any of the doc- 
trines of the English reformers, except that which flattered his 
vanity and love of arbitrary power by ascribing spiritual suprem- 
acy to the throne, and by the feeble Charles, the tyrant of his 
people, the slave of the prelacy, and the tool of his favourites, 
who, from mistaken sympathy, and from ignorance of his true 
character and purposes, is now reverenced as a martyr, and des- 
tined perhaps, when England shall become more thoroughly 
Romanized, to be venerated as a saint. 

The local separation of the colonies from England preserved 
their people from the re-action, which followed the accession of 
the polluted Charles 11, and before the close of that disgraceful 
reign, they had acquired sufficient physical strength, and suffi- 
cient unity and independence of character, to be able to protect 
themselves, in a great measure, from the encroachments of the 
royal prerogative, and the abuses of parliamentary tyranny. 

At an early period, they freed themselves from the last remnant 
and most offensive peculiarity of the Roman spirit, religious in- 
tolerance, and were the first communities, that recognized in spir- 
itual as well as temporal things that principle of the absolute le- 
gal equality of all men, which is implied in the first great law of 
Christianity, and without the practical acknowledgment of which, 
no state can rightfully claim to be established on a Christian ba- 
sis. 

The religious intolerance of the Pilgrims has been made the 
subject of the most unmeasured obloquy, and the grossest exag- 
geration. I shall not deny, that they, for a brief period, shared 
in the common error of that age ; but something must be allowed 
to that human weakness, which is unable, at a single bound, to 
free itself from the mental bondage of a thousand years, and to 



20 

that frailty, which yielded to the temptation to retaliate upon their 
oppressors, who followed them in their exile, the persecutions 
which they had suffered at home. 

But those apologists for the Anglican hierarchy, who inexora- 
bly condemn the Pilgrims, should remember that the error, which 
they discarded as soon as its inconsistency with the fundamen- 
tal principles of their faith and polity was felt, is still inherent in 
the British constitution ; that though religious opinion is, for the 
time, free in England, yet a large proportion of the people of the 
nation are not only excluded from all participation in the vast 
funds, which the charity of former ages accumulated for pious 
uses, but are by law compelled to contribute to the support of 
the religion of the state ; and, that while the supremacy of the 
civil government in ecclesiastical matters subsists, the English- 
man has no security against the re-enactment of those intolerant 
laws,* and the renewal of those persecutions, which damned to 

^■''It may not be amiss to specify some of the awful crimes against God and mnn 
perpetrated by the English hierachy, through the civil government, during the reign 
of Charles II, in the revival of obsolete, and the enactment of new statutes of in- 
tolerance. 

By one act, all officers of the crown were required to profess upon oath a belief 
in the King's rightful ecclesiastical supremacy, and to be actual communicants of the 
established church; by another, the appointment of any but such communicants to 
the humblest offices in municipal corporations w-as forbidden; by the conventicle 
act, attendance upon divine worship, where any other forms shonld be followed 
than those of the ritual prescribed by act of parliament, was prohibited upon pain 
of fine and imprisonment, and, upon repetition of the crime, of death, and to 
those accused of the oflence, atrial by jury w^as denied, the simple record of a 
justice of the peace being a sufficient warrant for the infliction of the penalty. IVo 
less than eight thousand British subjects are said to have died in prison, or upon 
the scafiold, for violating this law. The notorious Act of Uniformity, passed in 1662, 
required every clergyman in England to make oath and subscription to his belief 
of all things contained in the book of common prayer newly ordained by act of par- 
liament, and that, before the book was published and put in circulation ; so that 
not above one tenth of the clergy knew the contents of the book, to the truth of 
which they were required to make oath. By a fit, and probably intentional, coin- 
cidence, this act was ordered to take eflect on St. Bartholomews feast, and on that 
day two thousand of the wisest and holiest ministers of the church of England re- 
signed their livings, in preference to submitting to a decree as wicked as that which 
consigned thirty thousand French protestants to slaughter, on the same anniversar 



21 

everlasting infamy the reign of the foul usurper Charles II, and 
in their direct consequences, and lasting moral influence, brought 
upon the church and people of England a heavier curse than the 
visible judgments of fire and pestilence, that so signally witnessed 
the displeasure of Heaven. 

But the mistake of the Pilgrims was, after all, rather an error 
in fact than in principle. They knew not their own hio-h voca- 
tion ; they considered themselves, not as the founders of an em- 
pire, but merely as a private society, established for a specific 
purpose — the worship of God namely, in the humble simplicity 
of the Gospel — and rightfully entitled by charter and by occu- 
pancy to the possession of certain territorial limits, from which 
tiiey might lawfully exclude those, whose irreconcilable differen- 
ces of religious principle interfered with the grand object for 
which their community was established ; in short as a church, 
having the right, which all churches claim and exercise, of pre- 
scribing the terms of admission to their own body. But, as I 
have said, the error was of transient continuance, and it should 
be remembered, to the honour of the Pilgrims, that all men en- 
joyed liberty of conscience in the colony of Plymouth, at a period 
when conformity was enforced by the sword and the scaffold, in 
England and Scotland. 

The Novanglian character, as I have before observed, is most 
strongly marked by the intellectual peculiarities of that great race 
from which, with little intermixture, we are lineally descended ; and 

ry, ninety years before. And finally, another act forbade the silenced dissenting 
ministers to come within five miles of any city or borough sending members to par- 
liament, lest the foithful subjects of the pious Charles II should be contaminated, 
by breathing the same air with such men as John Howe and Richard Baxter. 

If to the victims of these nefarious laws we add the barbarous persecutions of 
the elder Leighton, Baxter, and hundreds of the wisest and most pious of English 
divinesj instigated by Laud, whose insane malice wag only equalled by his idiotical 
folly, Sheldon, Parker, Morley, the apostate Sharp, and other Bishops, we shall 
find a burden ofgui It resting upon the shoulders of the prelacyof the Stuart dynas- 
ty, which must forever render them the abhorrence of all men, in whose breasts sec- 
tarian bigotry has not extinguished every spark of rational humanity. See Nenl's 
History of the Puritans, a book which cannot be too highly recommended, to those 
who desire to study the history of the progress of religious liberty. 



22 

from causes more or less similar, the same traits will be found to 
characterize, in different degrees, the whole American people. In 
pointing out the fundamental distinctions between the primitive 
nnd the adscititious elements of English character, I haA-e in- 
cidentally alluded to some of their exemplifications. I shall now 
advert to some of the less obvious results of the influence of the 
Roman spirit on th« mind of England, with the view of shewing, 
that in these respects also, there is the same characteristic dif- 
ference between the mother country and cur cv.n. 

I ascribe then to the predominance of the Roman element, 
which sees things only in their outward and more imposing forms, 
the want of the historic sense in the British people. By those 
who have been taught to look for philosophy and truth in the pa- 
ges of Hume, the contemner of popular rights, aud the prejudiced 
apologist of the weak and profligate Stuarts, in the flowing nar- 
ratives of the elegant but superficial Robertson, in the half-learned 
Hajlam's rancorous hatred of the great Reformers, and his dis- 
honest perversions of the spirit of their writings, in the flippant 
coxcombry of the shallow and inflated Brougham, or in the tales 
of the weak, false, and malignant Alison, it will be deemed a 
heresy to deny that the literature of Britain has been inspired by 
the muse of history. But who, among British historical writers, 
belongs to that class of philosophical investigators, who see phe- 
nomena in their causes, who seek in history a picture of the life 
and soul of man, rather than of the movements of masses? You 
find but the external history of England, in those of her writers 
who have treated the subject ex profess o. You learn how Eng- 
land, France, Spain and Holland influenced the policy of each 
other, by action and re-action, but not how English men acted 
upon England. Her historians regard nations as homogeneous, 
unconscious masses, subject like inorganic matter to certain nat- 
ural laws, and moved only by impulses from without, and not as 
impersonations of the spirit of the individuals that compose them, 
acting in obedience to an internal law of organic and spiritual 
life. English history, therefore, is but the story of her foreign 
relations. You are told what wars she has waged, what conquests 



23 

she has achieved, what treaties she has negotiated; but if you 
would know what the Englisli man was, at any given period, you 
must glean your knowledge from scraps and fragments, from re- 
positories of documents inaccessible to ordinary students, or trust, 
for your pictures of life, to the uncertain page of the historical 
novelist. 

Byron found in Mitford the qualities which he required in a 
historian, learning, labour, wrath, research, and partiality ; and 
this strange list comprises the qualities and qualifications, which 
make up the popular English ideal of one, who acts as the priest 
of philosophy teaching by example.' We find abundant exem- 
plifications of the labour, the wrath, and the partiality in British 
historians, but the learning and the research are of rarer occur- 
rence ; and in the long list of England's historical writers, we can 
award the praise of the higher intellectual powers and philosoph- 
ical views which belong to his profession to but one — the infidel 
Gibbon — and in him we look in vain for that one quality, w^ith- 
out which all others are worse than useless, the impartial love of 
truth. 

To the same cause I ascribe the general inferiority of the Eng- 
lish, in both the theory and the practice of the arts of design. 
The wealth of England has accumulated a large proportion of 
the noblest productions of ancient and modern art. Greece, It- 
aly, Spain, Holland and Germany have been despoiled of many 
of their choicest treasures, to adorn the public galleries, or the 
private cabinets of the nobility. The marbles of Phidias, the 
beautiful vases of the old Greek and Etruscan potters, the canvass 
of Raphael, of Claude, of Correggio, of Murillo, of Durer and 
of Rembrandt, have been transferred to the banks of the Thames, 
and the affluence of the aristocracy enables them to bestow a 
munificent patronage on native genius. The opportunities of 
cultivating the taste by the study of the finest models abound in 
that country, and her proximity to the continent, and the cheap- 
ness of living in Italy, France, and Germany, make readily ac- 
cessible to her artists the galleries of Rome, Florence, Paris and 
Dresden. Here then are the means, and incentives to the at- 



24 

tainment of the highest excellence. Yet England has given birth 
to but one great original artist — the caricaturist Hogarth. The 
literature of art too in the English language is, if not a blank, a 
blot ; and England has produced few well written and well rea- 
soned treatises on the practice of art ; upon its theory, scarcely 
one. 

It is the incapacity to apprehend and seize in the outward forms 
of nature the law by which she works, the model or normal form 
to which she tends, or in other words to conceive and realize the 
ideal, that this deficiency is to be attributed. 

For this is the true theory of the ideal in formative art. Cer- 
tain forms and proportions of the organs, certain relations of the 
outline to the internal mechanism, constitute the type which com- 
bines the greatest amount, in kind and degree, of physical per- 
fections and sensuous beauty. Again^ form may be conceived 
of simply as the medium of expression ; and certain forms of hu- 
man, brute, and even vegetable life, are best suited to the ex- 
pression of particular passions and emotions. Among the possible 
forms, of equal sensuous beauty or physical perfection, therefore, 
there is a difference in adaptedness to express given traits of in- 
dividual character, or the feeling belonging to a particular action ; 
and nature has the same variety of outward expression, that she 
has of internal life. Nature, provided with the material and the 
vital stimulus, working according to her immutable laws, under 
conditions most favourable to her free action, would produce cer- 
tain invariable forms, combining in just proportion and accurate 
balance the physical perfections and the sensuous beauty, which 
characterize the type we spoke of, and in reality she approaches 
that type, just in proportion to the freedom with which she works. 
But as nature is conditioned by outward circumstances, and, 
from the earliest commencement to the full development of or- 
ganic life, is never free from disturbing causes, she is more or 
less controlled or thwarted in her operations, and all forms ac- 
tually realized are accordingly more or less abnormal. 

The soul too co-works with her creator in building up her ten- 
ement of clay, and strives to impress on the external lineaments 



25 

the characteristics of her own peculiar tendencies; and thus 
forms become not only abnormal, but unequal in power and char- 
acter of expression. Now the gifted sculptor or painter, by long 
study of nature's most perfect works, acquires an inner sense, or 
rather developes an inner faculty, whereby he pictures to himself 
those normal forms, to the realization of which productive na- 
ture tendsj whether it be the model of particular expression, or 
the canon or balanced type of general perfection, which requires 
for its fit representation both an action and an attitude of unim- 
passioned repose, and in which particular expression exists po- 
tentially only ; and in proportion as he succeeds in bodying forth 
and rendering sensible his ideal image, does he succeed in his 
work. The true artist then does not copy nature, as she is seen 
with the bodily eye, nor does he compose his forms of disjointed 
fragments of her actual works, but by an appropriation of her 
laws, and an exercise of the higher imagination, he triumphs over 
her, by realizing the ideal at which she aims, and, in strict pro- 
priety of speech, creates forms endued with a beauty, and clothed 
with a force of expression, which actual nature vainly strives to 
produce. 

This is ' the vision and the faculty divine,' that revealed to the 
transcendent genius of the lamented Allston those more than speak- 
ing forms of dignity and grace,that peopled-the canvass at the touch 
of his master hand. It is by thii-, that the Northern Thorvald- 
sen has outstripped all modern sculptors, and taken his stand by 
the side of Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus ; by this, that a 
kindred genius, a son of our own mountains,* has extorted from 
jealous Europe the praise of the highest excellence in his diffi- 
cult art; by this, that the American Greenough saw in the shape- 
less block the ennobled form of our Washington. 

The artists of America then have given abundant evidence of 
the possession of that creative power, which is confessedly the 
highest expression of genius ; nor need our youthful literature 
shrink from a comparison with that of any modern nation, in that 

♦I truet there is not one of my fellow citizens, whose bosom does not dilate 
with conscious pride, in claiming Hiram Powers as a native Vermontcr. 



2« 

other field of intellectual effort to which we have before alluded, 
while we can boast such writers as the learned, laborious, and 
judicious historian of Ferdinand and Isabella, or the elegant, im- 
partial, and philosophic Bancroft, happier at least in theme, if not 
in character as a historical writer. 

If we have achieved such triumphs in the very morning of our 
national existence, before our forests are yet felled, or our moras- 
ses drained, when we have neither public galleries nor private 
cabinets for the display of paintings and sculpture, and the for- 
mation of artistic taste, and when our public libraries are few in 
number, and inferior in extent to the private collections of many 
European literati, w^emay reasonably hope, that when our material 
facilities for advancement in knowledge and in taste shall be 
raised more nearly to the level of those of the more favoured of 
European countries, the works of our authors and our artists will 
rival the proudest labours, of ' highest hope and hardest attemp- 
ting ' in literature and in art, which ancient or modern times have 
produced. 

Another trait in the English character, resulting from a prone- 
ness to rest in the outward form, is the propensity to pay a ser- 
vile and fawning reverence to the members of the hereditary 
aristocracy, and to yield to them a weight of influence far beyond 
their constitutional authority. Rank is admired and coveted, 
not so much for its legal powers and privileges as for its external 
show, or in other words, because it makes the man seem to be 
what he is not; and artificial rank has, in the English mind, su- 
perseded the notion of personal and even of official dignity. Rank 
indeed is in some rare instances the reward of genius or of vir- 
tue, but as the vast majority of its possessors can lay claim to 
neither, it comes to be considered as independent of both, and 
the establishment of a hereditary aristocracy is a voluntary sacri- 
fice of a strong if not a lofty incentive to the attainment of high 
excellence, because it monopolizes the dignity which ought to 
be the reward of eminent public service. Artificial rank is sought 
too, not only for its present advantages, but because it is a cheap 
mode of attaining to that perpetuity of existence, to which, in all 



«7 

Its forms, whether material or spiritual, men universally, and of- 
ten unconsciously, aspire. The ribbon will be remembered when 
the man is forgotten ; the star, when he that bore it is buried in 
oblivion ; the title, when the personality has forever vanished. 

In those governments, on the other hand, where dignity and 
office are in the gift of the people, notwithstanding the frequent 
cases where political elevation is the fruit of secret intrigue, de- 
basing compliance with popular prejudice, or the other arts of 
the demagogue, yet in the main, the possession of official rank 
does imply in the incumbent the existence of talents or virtues, 
which elevate him above the common level of his fellov/ men ; and 
in general, it is a fair and just presumption, that his official sta- 
tion is a tribute to his superiority as a man. In the public mind 
therefore, the dignity of office is inseparably connected with the 
moral or intellectual excellence which it supposes ; and the officer 
is reverenced for his worth, not the man for his office. 

To instance in our own country ; what associations are called 
up by the names of Clay, of Webster, or of Calhoun 1 — For I will 
refer only to those not now invested v/ith official rank — .Do we 
remember the posts they have filled? Do we count the steps of 
their promotion from humble offices of narrow local jurisdiction, 
throuoh the state and national legislature, to the cabinet? Or do 
we not rather dwell upon the eloquence, the wisdom, and the 
virtues, which were the causes of their elevation, and which de- 
mand for them in private life the same reverence that we paid 
them, v/hen they controlled the destinies of their country? 

The longing for outward distinction to v/hich I have alluded, 
though unhappily far too common among ourselves, is yet emi- 
nently characteristic of the English character. The plain yeoman 
or artizan aspires to write himself gentleman, the gentleman to 
be addressed as Sir Thomas or Sir John, the knight or baronet to 
be saluted as my lord, and my lord again cherishes the hope of ta- 
king precedence as his grace. Thus life is spent in the chase after 
idle and arbitrary distinctions; and heroism, wisdom, and virtue, 
ceasing to be ends, and becoming mere means, degenerate into 
brute courage, deceitful cunning, and the hollow show of seeming 



28 

morality. English biography is full of lamentable proofs of the de- 
basing influence of this lust of rank on the noblest spirits, and even 
the genius of Scott was fired by no loftier aim, than the low am- 
bition of being the founder of a race of Scotch lairds. 

From the same source flows the family pride of England, or 
the low vanity of consanguinity or alliance with one ennobled 
probably not for the possession, but for the want, of all the qual- 
ities that lend dignity to humanity, — a feeling not only diverse 
from, but opposed to that honourable pride of birth, which el- 
evates us with the conscious sympathy of spirit, that assures us 
of our legitimate descent from an ancestry distinguished for vir- 
tue, wisdom, genius, orralour. 

Intimately connected with a hereditary aristocracy is a prac- 
tical abuse, which may deserve a passing notice. I refer to the 
principle of primogeniture in the descent of title and estate. 
Rank, when coupled u'ith oflice, must necessarily be limited to 
a particular individual in hereditary descent. But external dis- 
play is of the essence of the English notion of dignity, and there- 
fore the estate must descend with the rank, lest the dignity of the 
title should be disgraced for want of the wealth, which alone can 
invest it with the requisite splendour. 

The law of primogeniture is objectionable both on account of 
the mischiefs it works in practice, and the injustice of the prin- 
ciple on which it is founded. Traced to its origin, the law of 
primogeniture is but the law of the stronger. The majority of 
those who accumulate wealth die before their younger children 
attain to man's estate ; and in rude stages of society, before the 
promulgation oflav»^sof inheritance, the natural consequence 
follows, that the older children possess themselves of the inheri- 
tance, to the exclusion of the younger. And so strongly is this 
unjust propensity rooted, that in the best regulated communities, 
where the law distributes estates equally, without regard to age 
or sex, yet in practice it is a matter of serious difficulty to effect 
a fair division b-^tween adult and minor children, or between 
heirs of different sexes, the stronger and craftier age and sex 
uenallv obtaining the advantage, in the very teeth of the law. 



29 

I cannot here enter into a more detailed examination of the 
practical working of the principles which I have described as al- 
ways subsisting, and too often predominating in the English 
character ; and I must content myself with saying, that through 
their influence society in England has become unnatural and ar- 
tificial, to an extent never before exemplified in Europe. The 
seeming internal strength of the British social system is founded 
upon its own rottenness. It relies for its stability on a national 
bankruptcy, which makes it the interest of wealthy capitalists to 
uphold the credit of the government ; a system of sinecures and 
pensions, which draws around the standard of the executive an 
army of placemen, hirelings, and hungry expectants ; an oppres- 
sive corn law, which unites the opulent land holders in the sup- 
port of a policy that transfers to their pockets the hard earnings of 
the poor ; and lastly the adulterous union of church and state, 
and the princely power, wealth, pride and luxury of the prelacy,* 
which arrays the whole moral force of the established church in 
the defence of the existing order of things with all its flagitious 
abuses. That a system so monstrous can long subsist by its own 
strength, it is preposterous to suppose; and even now the integ- 
rity of the British empire is maintained only by the support, di- 
rect or indirect, of foreign powers. The policy of England, 
which consists in making universal commerce tributary to her 
interests, is hostile to the peace and prosperity of the Christian 

♦The revenues of the English bishops, wiih but four exceptions, exceed ten thou- 
sand dollars per annum. Two enjoy incomes little short of one hundred thousand 
dollars each, and ten receive more than the salary of the President of the United 
States. All the twenty seven English bishops are Lords of Parliament, 
excepting the incumbent of the diocese of Sodor and Man. 

That the enormous revenues of the English Bishops are not expended in works 
of charity appears from examinations of the records of Doctors Commons in 1828, 
by which it was shown that the twenty four bishops, who died in the twenty years 
preceding 1828, left to their heirs in personal property alone ohove seven millions of 
dollars, or about three hundred thousand dollars each upon an average. A bishop 
of Clogher in Ireland, of the established church, amassed from his episcopal reve- 
nues, in eight jears, no less than four hundred thoasand pounds sterling; and the 
Bishop of Cioyne in the same unhappy kingdom, who died in 1820, left one liun- 
dred and twenty thousand poundi. 



J 



30 

world, and either that policy must be modified by a domestic rev- 
olution, or, whenever a retaliatory system shall be generally adop- 
ted by other powers, or England forced to admit the principles 
of reciprocity in her intercourse with them, the smouldering fire 
that lurks in her vitals will burst forth, and Troja fuit will be 
inscribed on the ruins of her greatness. 

If we are in a good degree exempt from the evils of the social 
system of England, it is because we have rejected the cardinal 
principles from which those evils flow ; and it is both more just 
and more philosophical to ascribe the excellence of our in- 
stitutions to the conformity of our principles with right reason, 
than to rest satisfied with referring our prosperity to our external 
circumstances, without inquiring upon what basis those institu- 
tions, by which national welfare is controlled, are built. 

The defects of character most commonly imputed to New Eng- 
land are two. It is said that the love of gain is our ruling passion, 
and that we are destitute of the conservative principle, and the 
elevating influences, implied in the reverence for antiquity. 

The love of gain is a blameable passion, only when the accu- 
mulation of wealth is aimed at, irrespectively of its uses; when 
money is made an end, not a means. But the uses, and of course 
the necessity, for money are greater to the American citizen 
than to the European ; and the just and beneficial rule of the 
equal distribution of inheritances operates like an agrarian law, 
by dividing the wealth of the community once in a generation. 
Hence few, very few, begin life with a competence, and where 
there are none who are able to lead lives of literary or other ele- 
gant leisure, and all are devoted to some productive occupation, 
the community may, to a superficial observer, appear to be ac- 
tuated mainly by the love of gain. But the charge, after all, 
amounts to little more than this, that the working bees outnum- 
ber the drones; and the notorious fact, that the estates of few 
deceased persons more than suffice to sustain the helpless and 
educate the young of the family, is a proof, that the vice of ava- 
rice is neither deeply rooted, nor generally diffused, among us. 

But, as I have said, the uses of money are greater to the Amer- 



31 

ican citizen than to the European. The American, enjoying 
larger rights, is under mere comprehensive responsibilities, and 
to the discharge of these a competence is, if not necessary, at 
least helpful. Every citizen is directly or indirectly charged with 
all the duties, the performance of which is required for the just 
working of our system ; and every man of liberal views naturally 
and properly feels a desire to avail himself of all the means of 
advancement in life, which the institutions of his country make 
accessible to him. If he would qualify himself, by assiduous 
cultivation of the faculties, which God has given him, for use- 
fulness or distinction in political life, if he aim at the acquisition 
of knowledge for its pleasures or its honours, if he aspire to the 
hiofhest degree of intellectual culture, to gratify a refined taste 
by the contemplation and study of the miracles of art, to enrich 
his mind and liberalize his views by foreign travel, to aid in the 
diffusion of knowledge, or to contribute to the public and private 
charities of an eminently charitable age, he must, in general, first 
earn, by diligent and self-denying industry, the leisure and the 
pecuniary means, which all these various objects require. 

False notions of economy, and narrow views of the powers 
and duties of government, make our rulers niggardly in providing 
for the citizen the means of intellectual improvement and pro- 
gress. The means of primary instruction are but partially secured 
by public provision ; and government takes no thought for the 
higher seminaries, which are after all the true sources, even of 
the rudiments of knowledge. For knowledge, in its origin and 
diffusion, is like the current of a river. It rises not in the dead 
level of a vast champaign, but it is condensed from the vapours 
of heaven, on the summit of the cloud-capped hills ; and the high- 
er the source, the wider will be the vale it fertilizes. 

Our governments collect no libraries for public use, they fill 
no galleries with the productions of the pencil or the chisel, and 
primogeniture does not hand down the accumulated artistical or 
literary collections of opulent families, in an unbroken line, 
through successive generations. The American therefore, I re- 
peat, who desires those advantages, which in many parts of Eu- 



82 

rope are freely accessible to the poorest and the humblest, must 
acquire them for himself; and money is to him the indispensable 
condition, not only of many social enjoyments, but of all the advan- 
tages required for the development of his higher intellectual fac- 
ulties. He must purchase his own library, collect his ovrn cabinet, 
and buy with the sweat of his own brow, the leisure which tha 
prontable use of these facilities demands. 

I deny therefore, that we are justly chargeable with an inor- 
dinate love of wealth, or with parsimony in its use ; but I am 
obliged to admit, that in regard to the means of its acquisition, 
a radical error prevails both among our people, and in the policy 
of our government. I refer to the disposition to accumulate, not 
by increase, but by exchange ; to transfer wealth, not to produce 
it. Trade is a conduit, not a source, and its principle is oppo- 
sed to that of industry. The principle of industry is that of 
production, increase; that of trade, exchange, w^hich adds no- 
thing to the common stock, and can only increase the nominal 
value of articles of commerce by the expenses of importation. 
New countries must of necessity be commercial ; and productive 
industry can hardly flourish, until a great extent of arable land 
is brought under cultivation, facilities of communication are per- 
fected, and the physical resources of the territory developed; 
and little or no surplus of industrial products can be expected, un- 
til these preliminary labours be performed. The trading propen- 
sities of the New Englanders are the fruit of habits necessarily 
contracted during our colonial bondage, when productive indus- 
try was not only discouraged by the mother country, but scarcely 
capable in itself of furnishing employment for an active popula- 
tion. 

The first economical effort of government ought to be to pro- 
mote the greatest amount of production, regard being had to 
natural facilities, the proportion between labour employed and 
capital required, and the possible consumption of the product; 
the second, so to regulate trade, the handmaid of production, 
that it shall convey the surplus where it is most w^anted, and where 
of course, other things being equal, it may be expected to yield 



33 

ihu^bcsL returns. This ductriiie is fast becoming a part of the 
settled political creed of the North, and both government and 
people are now learning, that in a moral as well as in an eco- 
nomical ix)int of view, traffic is truly profitable only where it is 
mutually advantageous to both buyer and seller. 

The want of reverence for antiquity, which is charged upon 
us as a conspicuous defect, is in part the necessary consequence 
of that trait in our mental constitution, which impels us to neg- 
lect and overlook the outward form, and rest upon the indwel- 
ling principle. The notion of antiquity cannot attach to princi- 
ple ; for truth, being eternal, is ever young. Again, antiquity is 
but a comprehensive name for associations and traditions con- 
nected with localities, monuments, ruins or other ancient material 
objects. In this sense therefore, antiquity, and the reverence 
with which it is regarded, necessarily partake of a local charac- 
ter ; and an emigrating people leaves behind it, with the localities, 
the associations and the traditions upon which that reverence is 
founded. This is quite observable in reference to the events of 
our own early history, the traditional memory of which survives 
only near the localities where they transpired. 

For these two reasons therefore, neither the places, the monu- 
ments, nor the forms, which in the eye of the European are sacred, 
are regarded by the American with an equal degree of devout 
reverence. But there is still another reason for our comparative 
indifference to customs and objects, which, in the old world, are 
held in a degree of veneration little short of superstition. An- 
tiquity is relative. It depends not upon mere lapse of years, and 
that which is ancient to an Englishman is but of yesterday to a 
Chinese. In the brief period of two centuries, society has with 
us passed through all its phases, from the most pristine simplicity 
to the most artificial refinement, and occasion has been offered 
for the display of every quality, that ennobles man in any stage 
or condition of earthly existence, and in every variety of external 
relations. In our own short national career, our country has 
produced as brilliant examples of genius, wisdom, and virtue, 
instances of as devoted patriotism, as heroic valour, as noble gen- 



34 

erosity, as exalted piety, as the whole liistory of the Eastern world 
can boast. We look not then to ancient Athens or to Sparta, or 
to the dark ages of England or of France, for models of the high- 
est excellence of which our nature is capable ; and our own soil 
has its evergreen spots consecrated by the blood of the patriot, 
and the grave of the martyr. The only antiquity with which the 
sons of the Pilgrims can truly sympathize begins with the emi- 
gration of the Puritans. It was then, that the Lord brought our 
fathers out of Egypt, relieved them both from the temptations of 
the flesh-pots, and the oppressions of the accursed Pharaoh and 
his idolatrous hierophants, and made them a peculiar people unto 
himself. Let us not then, as some incline, return to the wor- 
ship of Apis, and set up the golden calf in the wilderness. He 
makes but a poor exchange, who barters the holy teachings, that 
parental instruction addressed to the heart, for the lessons of the 
stranger, that appeal but to the imagination ; who abandons the 
humble simplicity of our venerable and eminently primitive Chris- 
tian worship, for the pomp and splendour of more imposing rituals, 
or w^ho seeks his models in the house of the alien, and patterns 
not after the wise and good of his native land, whom the Prov- 
idence that appointed his birthplace has raised up to be his exem- 
plars. Our early history, though modern in date, has all the 
claims to our veneration that human virtue or divine favour can 
bestow. The youngest father is old and reverend in the eyes 
of his child ; and to the true American, the hoariest antiquity 
has no memories more venerable than the landing of the Pilgrims, 
no spot more sacred than the Plymouth Rock. 

Such then are the traits which characterize the mind of the 
true New-Englander ; such are the sources from which our in- 
stitutions flow. Our social system contains within itself all the 
elements of national prosperity; our national character the ele- 
ments most ffivourable to the growth of wisdom and of virtue. 

But there arc influences, both domestic and extraneous, which 
threaten the purity of our character, and the stability of those 
principles, the observance of which alone can preserve us in the 



35 

enjoyment of the prosperity and peace, that tlius far have been 
our lot. 

The most dangerous domestic influence is that of the large 
commercial towns. Most American cities have been founded 
for the purpose of trade, and of course upon an unfavourable 
moral basis. Your true citizen believes, that the chief end of 
man is to buy, sell, and get gain ; and deeming that which is 
profitable to be expediejit, he finds authority in the dishonest 
Paley, the oracle of English morality, for holding that which is ex- 
pedient to be right. The legitimate object of government he con- 
ceives to be to foster and encourage trade, and the proposition, 
that the rights and interests of the three hundred thousand inhab- 
itants of Vermont are equally entitled to protection with those 
of the three hundred thousand citizens of New-York, is to him a 
preposterous absurdity ; for he finds that if tried by the scale of 
imports and exports, his only unerring criterion, not Vermont 
only, but New-England kicks the beam. The distinction be- 
tween worth and exchangeable value he holds to be a metaphys- 
ical refinement, the revival of an exploded subtlety of a benighted 
age. His motto is : All things have their price ; and the pro- 
foundest of philosophers is the commercial alchemist, who ex- 
tracts a profit often per cent from a branch of business, which 
in the hands of other men yields but nine. 

Another trait in the character of the citizen is that narrowness 
of mind, which grows out of confined habits of life. With him 
the civilized world is bounded by the limits of the paved district, 
and all that outer region, which is not illuminated by street-lamps, 
and guarded by the vigilance of city watchmen, is shrouded in 
Cimmerian darkness, and plunged in the rudest barbarism. The 
country he regards as a pleasure-ground for the recreation of the 
citizen, and a field for the supply of his table, sparsely inhabited 
by a race of drudges, whose vocation is to toil, that they may pay 
tribute to the lords of creation, the money-changers of Wall 
Street, and the chapmen of Pearl. The uniformity of city life, 
the narrowness of its range, and the comparative permanence 
and regularity of its forms, require for success in life a smaller 



3G 

amount of intelligence, than is demanded to insure prosperity in 
the country. In spite therefore of the advantages, -which the 
concentration of the means of improvement brings within the 
reach of every citizen, you are met, at every corner of the city, 
by a crassitude of ignorance, which nowhere exists in the interior ; 
and it is an unquestionable fact, that the average standard, not 
only of intelligence, but of true refinement of feeling and taste, 
as distinguished from polish of manner, and observance of purely 
conventional forms, is higher in any given class in the country, 
than in the corresponding circle in commercial towns. 

Although the spirit of trade is unfavourable to the social sys- 
tem, because the relation between buyer and seller is to some ex- 
tent a hostile one, yet the identity of interest, and the strength 
resulting from concentration, have enabled the large commercial 
towns to acquire a weight of influence in our national councils, 
and over the national mind, wholly disproportioned to the intelli- 
gence, the numbers, or even the wealth of their inhabitants. 
The cities, themselves swayed by corrupt and selfish principles, 
control that public opinion, which gives law to the land ; and the 
infection of their example has tended to strengthen the otherwise 
too strong disposition of the times to rely, for the accomplishment 
of all great objects, rather upon organized corporate, than indi- 
vidual, action. That the principle of associate action is one of 
great efficiency, and frequent necessity, in other matters besides 
the affairs of government, is not to be denied ; but it is liable to 
great abuses, because it tends to substitute the will or caprice of 
the majority for the conscience of the individual, and thus by a 
too frequent recourse to it, the sense of personal responsibility, 
and the individuality of character are impaired, and the sphere 
of conscious obligation narrowed. Men yield to their sect what 
they deny to their God ; they cease to recognize their allegiance 
to their country, and talk of their duty to the more visible and 
tangible organization of their party, or to some smaller clique of 
their personal followers and friends. Demagogue has come to 
signify not the leader, but the tool, of the multitude ; and politi- 
cians, serving where they should control, following where they 



should guide, purchase power at the price of liberty, and that 
they may rule over others, scruple not to enslave themselves. 

Again, the commercial towns are the inlet to that pestiferous 
influence, which is the principal, if not the only, extraneous 
source of real danger to our institutions and our principles. I 
speak not here of the lesser evils resulting from the propensity to 
ape the fashions and extravagances, and to adopt the forms and 
fripperies, of the social life of monarchical or aristocratic coun- 
tries, but of the deeper mischiefs, which threaten to sap the foun- 
dations of our prosperity and our virtue, by undermining the 
principles of civil and religious polity on which they rest. Every 
foreign heresy or folly in religion and in government finds a con- 
genial soil in that corrupted mass of outlandish renegades and 
adventurers, and denaturalized Americans, that composes so large 
a proportion of the population of our largest towns. Here they 
strike root, and hence they spead their fibres and ramifications, 
through the whole body of society. It is from England, that 
this poison mainly distils; and our community of origin, law and 
language, and our extensive commercial relations, and facility of 
intercourse with that country, expose us to the constant danger 
of an influence most hostile to the permanence and integrity of 
our social system. That influence is already great in most of 
our commercial towns, and in some of the largest unhappily par- 
amount ; but the mass of the people of New-England still regard 
with a wholesome jealousy the teachings and the policy of the 
land of our old oppressors. Our most valuable institutions, and 
most cherished privileges, are the fruit of a spirit, which has lit- 
tle in common with present English character. They contain 
within themselves a principle of life, and progressive develop- 
ment, the action of which can be promoted by no foreio-n stim- 
ulus ; and the infusion of extraneous elements will cause a fer- 
mentation, which can only end in their own violent expulsion, or 
the corruption of the whole mass. The traits of character, which 
I have ascribed to our Puritan ancestors, and their necessary 
counterpart, the principles of civil and ecclesiastical polity which 
they finally adopted, are characteristic of our race, they belong 



38 

to our mental constituion, they are a part of our nature, and the 
son of the Pilgrims who discards them purcliases his new light 
at the expense of a schism in his own inner man. But I have 
already given my views of the defects of the English mind at so 
great length, that I need not detain you by dwelling on the dan- 
gers to which an approximation to it would expose us. Let it 
suffice to say, that as a diversity of principles has emancipated 
us from the principal evils of the English plan of government in 
church and state, so an assimilation of our own character to that 
from which we have diverged, could not fail to bring upon us the 
burdens under which England now groans; and a new emigra- 
tion to some yet barbarous and untrodden coast would be the on- 
ly refuge for those descendants of the Pilgrims, who have re- 
mained faithful to the principles of their fathers. 

I have now pointed out the leading excellencies of the char- 
acter of New-England, and the sources whence they are deriv- 
ed, and briefly hinted at some of the dangers, which threaten 
to overthrow our outward prosperity, and to undermine the 
foundations on which it rests; and I have endeavored so to treat 
the subject, that the duties resulting from these views, should 
without formal specification, suggest themselves. The duty how- 
ever which I wish specially to enforce is that of such a thorough 
and comprehensive study of our own history, and of that branch 
of the English family to which we belong, as shall lead to a just 
appreciation of the characters and principles of our forefathers, 
and of their intimate and inseparable connexion with those equal 
institutions, which are the pride and life of every true-hearted 
American. The knowledge, which such study alone c^n give, will 
be found to be the best and surest source of a devout and en- 
during love of country, as contradistinguished from that turbu- 
lent and demagogical counterfeit patriotism, which drew down 
the merited reproof of Johnson's well known harsh sarcasm. A- 
merican history, instead of being postponed to that of Greece and 
Rome, of England or of France, ought to occupy a conspicuous 
place in the course of instruction in every seminary, from the 
primary to the professional school ; and in regard to our knowl- 



39 



<. 



edge of all that pertains to our country, it were well to emulate 
the true Gothic spirit of that noble Dane, who resented as an 
indignity the inquiry whether he could speak German as fluent- 
ly as Danish, and thanked God thnt he knew no language so well 
as his mother tongue. 

The duty to which I refer is particularly incumbent on those, 
who, like the young gentlemen of the society which I have the 
honor to address, are devoting a few years of scholastic retire- 
ment to preparation for the higher duties of active life. Upon 
you it will devolve to expound from the pulpit, the chair, and 
the bench, the laws of God, of nature, and of man. You can 
neither comprehend nor apply the principles of your country's 
laws, without a knowledge of her history; and you can nowhere 
find happier illustrations of the practical influence of the unad- 
ulterated word of God, as expounded not by human tradition or 
authority, but by the reason and the heart, than in the lives of 
your Puritan ancestors, 

I do not expect for New-England a high degree of pecuniary 
prosperity, or political influence. Our rude climate and com- 
paratively rugged and barren soil must yield the palm to the soft- 
er skies of the South, and the luxuriant prairies of the West. 
The population of our mountains and our valleys will increase 
in a ratio far short ofthe rapid multiplication of the inhabitants of 
the newer states ; and our proportional weight in the national leg- 
islature will diminish with every census. But the mighty West will 
look back with filial reverence to the birth-place ofthe fathers of 
her people, and the schools of New-England will still be nursing 
mothers to the posterity of her widely scattered children. If 
then we cannot be the legislators of our common country, let 
it be your care that we become not unworthy to be its teachers, 
and though we cannot give it law, let us not cease to give it 
light. 



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